Dustin's Smell

This post originally appeared on another blog of mine on March 4, 2014. I'm transferring some creative non-fiction over to this one.

Here's the story:

I'm feeling bloggy again. I know exactly why. I started reading Annie Dillard's The Writing Life over lunch, took a walk (during which I remembered the 400 stories I still need to tell), and then couldn't recover from the experience.

Here's a story:

When I was about 14, I had a huge crush on a boy that my parents didn't approve of. He wasn't a bad kid, but when your mom and dad both teach at the junior high, they know pretty much everything about anyone you might ever want to date. "Dustin doesn't do his homework," my mom said, with seemingly complete assurance that this piece of information would kill my teenage desire and end the conversation. It didn't.

He asked me out. I was a super nerdy, kind of tomboyish, average-looking sort of girl. I had a million friends, but boys, especially boys who didn't do their homework, didn't ask me out every day.

Going out meant sitting next to each other at the movies with a big group of friends, but even to that, my parents said no. I accepted my fate with tears and yelling and wringing of hands, but I accepted it.

I yearned for this boy. It was no "OMG, he is so cute!" squealing with your girlfriends kind of yearning. It wasn't heady, wasn't champagne bubbles; it was guts-deep, raspy-sounding desire.

He came to my house one afternoon. "He's the kind of boy who just drops by without calling," said my mom. I didn't let him in, but I talked to him a minute on the porch. After he hugged me goodbye, the smell of his cologne stayed on my clothes. After more than 20 years, I can still remember exactly what it smelled like.

Occasionally, I pass a man on the street, in the mall, at school, who smells like Dustin, and desire surges up through me, reddens my face, drops the pitch of my voice. Lovers' faces blur in my memory, but even though we never kissed in 1993, I still remember Dustin's smell.